Iraq: the imperial precedent

The United States seems determined to enforce regime change in Iraq, but far less certain just what regime it wants to replace that of Saddam Hussein, or what kind of Iraq it hopes to set up after the war. But the state of Iraq as we know it is in fact the almost accidental result of the British invasion of Mesopotamia in 1914, and subsequent poor imperial choices and default decisions. History, as ever, has been here before.

IN BAGHDAD, an authoritarian regime, backed by military force, exercises a powerful grip over Iraq and poses a direct strategic threat to the interests of the major Western power in the region. A military expedition against the regime is mounted and, after a campaign that proves more difficult and costly than anticipated, Baghdad is captured and a new political order established under Western military and political control. But just as it seems that direct foreign rule is establishing the shape of the future for Iraq, rebellion breaks out among Iraqi army officers on the streets of Baghdad and throughout the Shi’ite centre and south of the country, putting the whole enterprise in jeopardy.

The uprising is eventually crushed, but the cost of doing that leads to a radical rethink in the army of occupation and in its government back home. In place of the ambitious visions once entertained by the occupiers, a more modest, cheaper plan emerges. It recognises the existing socio-political hierarchy in Iraq and hands control of the state, under Western surveillance, to the administrative and military elites of the old regime.

This is not a prediction of the next 12 months in Iraq. It is a description of events that took place over 80 years ago, when Great Britain conquered the three Ottoman provinces of Basra, Baghdad and Mosul and welded them into the new state of Iraq. The fact that there are echoes of the present and of possible future scenarios in Iraq has less to do with some irreducible essence of Iraqi history than with the logic of imperial power. If there is a war, the United States could find itself facing choices similar to those faced by Britain between 1914 and 1921. It is worth reflecting upon those choices to understand whether the exercise of imperial power in the task of state reconstruction has a similar logic. This could throw light on the kind of Iraq which an American military occupation might bring into being.